This page is a compendium of items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, damnable prevarications, rants and amusing anecdotes - about LAUSD and/or public education that didn't - or haven't yet - made it into the "real" 4LAKids blog and weekly e-newsletter at http://www.4LAKids.blogspot.com . 4LAKidsNews will be updated at arbitrary random intervals.

Thursday, December 24, 2015

SHOULD LOS ANGELES HAVE CLOSED SCHOOLS WHEN FACED WITH A THREAT? +smf's 2¢

A
gate to Birmingham Community Charter High School is locked with a sign
stating that school is closed, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2015, in Van Nuys,
Calif. All schools in the vast Los Angeles Unified School District, the
nation's second largest, closed Tuesday due to an electronic threat.
(Danny Moloshok/AP)

December 20, 2015 :: My
wife, Linda, and I had an argument about the New York public schools
staying open and the Los Angeles public schools closing when both got
wild threats from what appeared to be the same source.

I thought
the New York school administrators were wise to follow their police
experts, who said the threat was not credible. It appears that the Los
Angeles police experts also thought that their threat was bogus, but the
school superintendent closed the schools anyway. I thought that wasted
learning time and set a bad precedent.

Linda,
though, was born in San Bernardino County, scene of the massacre of 14
people by Muslim extremists two weeks ago, and she has many family
members there yet. She thought the L.A. schools were right to close,
despite the false threat, because parents would be too afraid to send
their kids to school.

Eventually,
I saw her point. School leaders must be gentle with upset parents,
whose fears are self-correcting. A series of threats is unlikely to
bring more closings because parents will realize someone is trying to
manipulate them. Real school attackers almost never announce themselves.
A federal study of 1,055 bomb incidents in schools between 1990 and
2002 found that just 14 were accompanied by a warning to schools or
other authorities.

Los
Angeles-area students head back to school at the Edward R. Roybal
Learning Center in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2015. (Damian
Dovarganes/AP)

I decided that school leaders who show an abundance of caution do what is best for their systems.

But
I missed something. When I contacted Kenneth Trump, who has been
advising school districts on safety issues for decades, he gently
explained why Los Angeles had blown it.

“The best practice is to
assess and then react, not react and then assess,” he said. “School
leaders should be very conservative in evacuating and closing schools if
there is not a credible threat. When you evacuate or close schools, you
lose the ability to supervise children and to keep them secure.”

He
said school officials are not explaining to parents, prior to a threat,
“why it is less safe to evacuate or close schools and more safe to keep
kids in schools under heightened security and supervision while they
investigate. Instead, superintendents, principals and boards are doing
just what we saw in L.A.: responding to the emotional and political
climate.”

Trump reviewed 812 school threats across the country
from August through December 2014. Of those threats, 44 percent involved
bombs and 29 percent involved guns. Almost all were hoaxes. Trump
thinks that the number of false threats is increasing and that more
planning and information to parents are needed so that we have less
panic and fewer copy-cat threats.

Will that work? I can see the
value of explaining the dangers of closing schools, particularly to
parents who depend on public education for child care. I wager that
children on average have more people watching out for them in school
than at home. Arranging a babysitter on short notice can be expensive.
Taking your children to work can be inconvenient.

But will
dispensing such information at a time of jangled nerves, such as they
are nowadays, be taken in the spirit it was offered? I can hear the
question at a PTA meeting: Do you want our children at school when some
maniac is driving around with assault weapons?

Most of
us realize that our reactions to events like the carnage in San
Bernardino are not rational. Research has shown that we tend to be less
afraid of circumstances in which we think we are in control, such as
driving a car, than situations in which we are not, such as riding in an
airplane. Yet automobiles produce far more fatalities per miles
traveled than airplanes do.

CNN reported the chances of being killed by terrorists are infinitesimal. Death by lightning is four times more likely.

We
understand the math. We are rational creatures. It is hard to think
about our children in that way, but it is worth a try. School districts
should do their best to explain the real dangers of threats that are
almost always false.

Matthews misses one key point. The ultimate decision to not close the schools in New York City was made by the Mayor of New York - a politician. The decision to close the schools in LAUSD was made by the Superintendent - an educator.